Desire abides. It is all people have that stands proof against time. Everything else rots.
After a time, though, Inman found that he had left the book and was simply forming the topography of home in his head. Cold Mountain, all its ridges and coves and watercourses. Pigeon River, Little East Fork, Sorrell Cove, Deep Gap, Fire Scald Ridge. He knew their names and said them to himself like the words of spells and incantations to ward off the things one fears most.
From inside the tavern came the sounds of a fiddle being tuned, various plucks and tentative bowings, then a slow and groping attempt at Aura Lee, interrupted every few notes by unplanned squeaks and howls. Nevertheless the beautiful and familiar tune was impervious to poor performance, and Inman thought how painfully young it sounded, as if the pattern of its notes allowed no room to imagine a future clouded and tangled and diminished.
To him, the world had no order of succession, no causation, no precedent. Everything he saw was new-minted, and thus every day was a parade of wonders.
Ada wondered about his hundreds of tunes. Where were they now and where might they go if he died.
When Ada disappeared into the trees, it was like a part of the richness of the world had gone with her. He had been alone in the world and empty for so long. But she filled him full, and so he believed everything that had been taken out of him might have been for a purpose. To clear space for something better.
WILDE SAID, I hoped he could offer advice on ways Ireland might free itself. He has been the greatest revolutionary of the past century. – He was never a rebel. He was a businessman and a politician who believed the Constitution protected the capital of his class and culture above everything else.
There in the highlands, clear weather held for much of the time. The air lacked its usual haze, and the view stretched on and on across rows of blue mountains, each paler than the last until the final ranks were indistinguishable from the sky. It was as if all the world might be composed of nothing but valley and ridge.
The father let his rifle down and stood its butt against the porch boards. The boy, though, kept alert. There was a good deal of killer about him, and it was why he still lived. The last four years had made a whole generation of young boys – who ought to have been going to school and learning a trade and thrilling deep in their bones just to dance with a girl and peck her on the cheek – into slit-eyed killers with no more tell of emotion than an old riverboat faro gambler.
So even very young she saw slavery as an ancient practice arising because rich people would rather not do hard work, and also from the tendency of people to clench hard to advantageous passages in the Bible and dismiss the rest.
Even on the worst days, details of her old life seemed like a museum exhibition, artifacts to study and understand in historical context.
We all reach a point where we would like to draw a line across time and declare everything on the far side null. Shed our past life like a pair of wet and muddy trousers, just roll their heavy clinging fabric down our legs and step away. We also reach a point where we would give the rest of our withering days for the month of July in our seventeenth year. But no thread of Ariadne exists to lead us back there.
So, a little morphine, a good sweat, and a bowel movement – the cure for everything that ails you.
Her need to shape memory into history.
Because, like so many of them, he held no beloved idea or philosophy as tightly as his money purse. Take a king or a president or anybody. Put a heavy sack of gold in one hand and a feather-light.
The comeliest order on earth is but a heap of random sweepings.
The instant passed so fast, and when that happens, it goes for good and all you have is a slow lifetime to speculate on revisions.
Old Point Comfort was where the first Africans were set ashore from a Dutch ship in 1619.
I do know that however hard you try, you can’t see the inside tangle of somebody else’s love – or whatever uglier word applies – not deep enough to make sense of it.
We all reach a point where we would like to draw a line across time and declare everything on the far side null. Shed.